In my work life I come across many a sad case a girl strangled and forced to submit by a mother desperate not to let her youngster fly the nest. I understand the question of mother and daughter being so meshed in their own co-dependency with hate and love in equal measure and whether a parent ‘owns’ their children like they own a pet. I am unsure whether Jelinek meant for us to pity her protagonist, to envy her, to despise her or one of another 100 different emotions. I simply couldn’t like nor care for her situation at the end. It is strange then that we are somehow supposed to muster empathy for this woman after 250+ pages of artsy, holier than thou nonsense. The story is one of a masochistic, sexually repressed 30 something year old Erika… hardly the most pleasant of characters and certainly not one to warm to. As someone else wrote on Goodreads, anything more than 5 or ten pages and my brain turned to mush and I had to sleep. I waded through this fairly short novel over the course of about 3 weeks and it was a slog. Why? Because I don’t quite know what happened and by the end my head was spinning from the sheer volume of words that had no real meaning and no real sense of purpose. In fact, this novel has me stumped more than Sound and the Fury. I honestly don’t know where to start with this review.
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